Camouflaging the Chimera
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.
We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren't there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man's eyelid.
This poem starts out with the imagery of soldiers, as it talks about camouflage and helmets. While not using the term camouflage in the poem, the title suggests that the foliage attached to the helmets was an effort to distort the image of the silhouette of that soldier. The who first stanza talks about their efforts of preparation to hide and paint their beings so that they will not be detected. The point is to not look like soldiers, in fact the point is to look as far from a soldier as possible. They want to blend in and become a part of their surroundings as they hide in plain sight, ready to ambush and kill the enemy at close range.
The second stanza touches more upon this notion of becoming one with the jungle of Vietnam. “We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target.” Their purpose was to appear as foliage or as trees (hummingbird’s target). “tiger suits” is an allusion to the different type of camouflage that these special forces used, which was different from standard issue olive green uniforms. They had various shades of green and brown and came to be known as tiger suits because of their slim lined patterns matching that of a tiger. It is interesting because Komunyakaa himself was never a part of this type of search and destroy unit, as he was a journalist during the war. I guess he wants to show the extent of the effort these elite units spent to perform a simple “L-Shaped” ambush.
In the other parts of the poem Komunyakaa describes more of what goes through a soldier’s mind during the dull waiting periods waiting for the enemy to walk into an ambush. Silently, a soldier may think of women back home or memories of a recent leave in one of the bigger cities of Southeast Asia. Komunyakaa doesn’t spend too much time on this theme, but in a few of his other poems he works to show the emotional side of soldiers fighting away from home.
Facing It
My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Perhaps one of Komunyakaa’s more well-known poems, “Facing It” speaks about the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. This poem was also featured in our class and also on a previous AP exam I believe.
Facing it was written as a first person perspective as one of the names on the stone in the beginning of the poem. As Komunyakaa is black, he does say how his identity as a black man fades into the stone as he is no longer remembered as a person, but as a name. A statistic. This idea pervades the poem as the incincerity is apparent in the way in which he starts out the poem. The contradiction hits this soldier in the lines when he states, “I’m stone. I’m flesh.” This quick change in being hints upon how those of the Wall are remembered, meaning some remember them as the heroes they were or simply just one name of thousands inscribed on a granite memorial. This contrast is an interesting view even still because it is all still from a dead soldier looking out from a stone wall.
Speaking of the Wall, later on in the rest of the poem, it is considered to be a metaphor for the War itself. As “she walks away, the names stay on the wall” shows how even though civilian life goes on, the dead remain dead and are easily forgotten. When the “white vet” comes close, it is mentioned that he “lost his right arm inside the stone” showing another connection to the wall as War. The stone’s symbolism as war works to show the separation between civilians and those that were/are in the Wall. The nice shiny outside layer of the granite hides a hard brutal solid granite core that is infused with steel to support it.
“Hiding inside the black granite” shows the way in which the dead soldier has a barrier between himself and the general public, as they will never quite understand what it is like to serve and die for a war (an unpopular war at that). The woman “trying to erase names… brushing a boy’s hair” shows the contradiciting views of the names as a statistic or person as she either combs the boy’s hair or fruitlessly tries to remove him from the wall.
Tunnels
Yusef Komunyakaa
Crawling down headfirst into the hole, he kicks the air and disappears I feel like I’m down there with him, moving ahead, pushed by a river of darkness, feeling blessed for each inch of the unknown. Our tunnel rat is the smallest man in the platoon, in an echo chamber that makes his ears bleed when he pulls the trigger. He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish easing toward imagined blue, pulled by something greater than life’s ambitions. He can’t think about spiders & scorpions mending the air, or care about bats upside down like gods in the mole’s blackness. The damp smell goes deeper than the stench of honey buckets. A web of booby traps waits, ready to spring into broken stars. Forced onward by some need some urge, he knows the pulse of mysteries & diversions like thoughts trapped in the ground Every cornered shadow has a life He questions each root. to bargain with. Like an angel pushed up against what hurts, his globe-shaped helmet follows the gold ring his flashlight casts into the void. Through silver lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence, he goes, the good soldier, on hands & knees, tunneling past death sacked into a blind corner, loving the weight of the shotgun that will someday dig his grave.
In Vietnam, Viet-Cong loved to use tunnels to safely evade detection during the Vietnam War. So naturally, the military was forced to clear these tunnels. Many times, regular soldiers were chosen because of their small size to go alone into the darkness to search and kill any enemy combatants living in these cramped quarters. Beyond primitively built and liable to collapse, each tunnel was possibly filled with booby traps and or angry little Vietnamese soldiers waiting to kill the lone soldier. The poem takes the reader through this experience, starting with the awkward inverted entry of the “tunnel rat” into the hole. The kicking of the air suggests his being awkward and out of place as well as his disparity in the situation. The tunnel rat was always the smallest in the platoon as Komunyakaa points out, because for obvious reasons the Vietnamese were much smaller than the average American. The “echo chamber that makes his ears bleed when he pulls the trigger” is just that. When you fire a gun in an enclosed space, the pressure overwhelms your eardrums. There is not much more significance to this statement other than to point out the further discomfort of the hole. “He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish” clearly is symbolic speech to how slowly and quietly he moves in this echo chamber. The slightest sounds could result in his death. The tunnel rat must be focused and can not think about the clear discomfort he is in, between the rats and bugs and horrid smell coming from the tunnel. The “web of booby traps” are the clear danger that he goes for but just continues to push on “forced by some need”. He is very attentive at this point, paying attention and “questions each root” for any signs of tampering or possible trip wires to a booby trap. The horrible situation he is in does not change, but he continues on, fulfilling his duty as a good soldier. He does it because he knows if he doesn’t, someone else will have to go through this and clear the tunnel at later date.
Thanks
Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper’s bullet.
I don’t know hwat made the grass
sway seconds before the viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
causing some dark bird’s love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we oplayed some deadly game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarchwrtihing on a single thread
tied to a farmer’s gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. maybe the hills grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I’m still fallinvg trhough its silence.
I don’t know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.
Komunyakaa, like every soldier, expects at some point that they are going to die. All veterans and survivors of terrible incidents ask the question, “why me, why did God choose me to live?” Komunyakaa addresses this question in a quasi-religious manner by thanking God(?) for all these fortunate events that befell him in war.
Komunyakaa first describes a situation where he saw a sniper before any shot was fired, because he saw a little flower that caught his attention. These few seconds of time gave him the opportunity to take cover behind a tree. These few seconds perhaps saved his life, and Komunyakaa accounts this to the flower that he noticed. The “vague white flower that pointed to the gleaming metal” is what he claims saved his life, and that he credits God for saving him through that flower. Also another saving moment mentioned in the poem is the dud hand grenade. Grenades are meant to explode, and a large majority of the time they do. Thanks to God and perhaps human error, Komunyakaa was saved from being blown into tiny bits. Truly another miracle. Komunyakaa shows thankfulness but also questions the “why me” aspect of it all. “I don’t know why the intrepid sun touched the bayonet, but I know that something stood among those trees.” Komunyakaa feels blessed and is thankful for being saved in this poem.
Yosef Komunyakaa
Patrick Heller
Camouflaging the Chimera
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.
We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren't there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man's eyelid.
This poem starts out with the imagery of soldiers, as it talks about camouflage and helmets. While not using the term camouflage in the poem, the title suggests that the foliage attached to the helmets was an effort to distort the image of the silhouette of that soldier. The who first stanza talks about their efforts of preparation to hide and paint their beings so that they will not be detected. The point is to not look like soldiers, in fact the point is to look as far from a soldier as possible. They want to blend in and become a part of their surroundings as they hide in plain sight, ready to ambush and kill the enemy at close range.
The second stanza touches more upon this notion of becoming one with the jungle of Vietnam. “We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target.” Their purpose was to appear as foliage or as trees (hummingbird’s target). “tiger suits” is an allusion to the different type of camouflage that these special forces used, which was different from standard issue olive green uniforms. They had various shades of green and brown and came to be known as tiger suits because of their slim lined patterns matching that of a tiger. It is interesting because Komunyakaa himself was never a part of this type of search and destroy unit, as he was a journalist during the war. I guess he wants to show the extent of the effort these elite units spent to perform a simple “L-Shaped” ambush.
In the other parts of the poem Komunyakaa describes more of what goes through a soldier’s mind during the dull waiting periods waiting for the enemy to walk into an ambush. Silently, a soldier may think of women back home or memories of a recent leave in one of the bigger cities of Southeast Asia. Komunyakaa doesn’t spend too much time on this theme, but in a few of his other poems he works to show the emotional side of soldiers fighting away from home.
Facing It
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Perhaps one of Komunyakaa’s more well-known poems, “Facing It” speaks about the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. This poem was also featured in our class and also on a previous AP exam I believe.
Facing it was written as a first person perspective as one of the names on the stone in the beginning of the poem. As Komunyakaa is black, he does say how his identity as a black man fades into the stone as he is no longer remembered as a person, but as a name. A statistic. This idea pervades the poem as the incincerity is apparent in the way in which he starts out the poem. The contradiction hits this soldier in the lines when he states, “I’m stone. I’m flesh.” This quick change in being hints upon how those of the Wall are remembered, meaning some remember them as the heroes they were or simply just one name of thousands inscribed on a granite memorial. This contrast is an interesting view even still because it is all still from a dead soldier looking out from a stone wall.
Speaking of the Wall, later on in the rest of the poem, it is considered to be a metaphor for the War itself. As “she walks away, the names stay on the wall” shows how even though civilian life goes on, the dead remain dead and are easily forgotten. When the “white vet” comes close, it is mentioned that he “lost his right arm inside the stone” showing another connection to the wall as War. The stone’s symbolism as war works to show the separation between civilians and those that were/are in the Wall. The nice shiny outside layer of the granite hides a hard brutal solid granite core that is infused with steel to support it.
“Hiding inside the black granite” shows the way in which the dead soldier has a barrier between himself and the general public, as they will never quite understand what it is like to serve and die for a war (an unpopular war at that). The woman “trying to erase names… brushing a boy’s hair” shows the contradiciting views of the names as a statistic or person as she either combs the boy’s hair or fruitlessly tries to remove him from the wall.
Tunnels
Yusef Komunyakaa
Crawling down headfirst into the hole,
he kicks the air and disappears
I feel like I’m down there with him, moving ahead, pushed by a river of darkness, feeling
blessed for each inch of the unknown.
Our tunnel rat is the smallest man in the platoon,
in an echo chamber that makes his ears bleed
when he pulls the trigger.
He moves as if trying to outdo
blind fish easing toward imagined blue,
pulled by something greater than life’s
ambitions. He can’t think about
spiders & scorpions mending the air,
or care about bats upside down like gods in the mole’s blackness.
The damp smell goes deeper
than the stench of honey buckets.
A web of booby traps waits, ready
to spring into broken stars.
Forced onward by some need
some urge, he knows the pulse
of mysteries & diversions
like thoughts trapped in the ground
Every cornered shadow has a life
He questions each root.
to bargain with. Like an angel
pushed up against what hurts,
his globe-shaped helmet
follows the gold ring his flashlight casts into the void. Through silver
lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence,
he goes, the good soldier,
on hands & knees, tunneling past
death sacked into a blind corner,
loving the weight of the shotgun
that will someday dig his grave.
Call of Duty... :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3n7AhTKRvA
In Vietnam, Viet-Cong loved to use tunnels to safely evade detection during the Vietnam War. So naturally, the military was forced to clear these tunnels. Many times, regular soldiers were chosen because of their small size to go alone into the darkness to search and kill any enemy combatants living in these cramped quarters. Beyond primitively built and liable to collapse, each tunnel was possibly filled with booby traps and or angry little Vietnamese soldiers waiting to kill the lone soldier.
The poem takes the reader through this experience, starting with the awkward inverted entry of the “tunnel rat” into the hole. The kicking of the air suggests his being awkward and out of place as well as his disparity in the situation. The tunnel rat was always the smallest in the platoon as Komunyakaa points out, because for obvious reasons the Vietnamese were much smaller than the average American. The “echo chamber that makes his ears bleed when he pulls the trigger” is just that. When you fire a gun in an enclosed space, the pressure overwhelms your eardrums. There is not much more significance to this statement other than to point out the further discomfort of the hole. “He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish” clearly is symbolic speech to how slowly and quietly he moves in this echo chamber. The slightest sounds could result in his death. The tunnel rat must be focused and can not think about the clear discomfort he is in, between the rats and bugs and horrid smell coming from the tunnel.
The “web of booby traps” are the clear danger that he goes for but just continues to push on “forced by some need”. He is very attentive at this point, paying attention and “questions each root” for any signs of tampering or possible trip wires to a booby trap.
The horrible situation he is in does not change, but he continues on, fulfilling his duty as a good soldier. He does it because he knows if he doesn’t, someone else will have to go through this and clear the tunnel at later date.
Thanks
Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper’s bullet.
I don’t know hwat made the grass
sway seconds before the viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
causing some dark bird’s love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we oplayed some deadly game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarchwrtihing on a single thread
tied to a farmer’s gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. maybe the hills grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I’m still fallinvg trhough its silence.
I don’t know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.
Komunyakaa, like every soldier, expects at some point that they are going to die. All veterans and survivors of terrible incidents ask the question, “why me, why did God choose me to live?” Komunyakaa addresses this question in a quasi-religious manner by thanking God(?) for all these fortunate events that befell him in war.
Komunyakaa first describes a situation where he saw a sniper before any shot was fired, because he saw a little flower that caught his attention. These few seconds of time gave him the opportunity to take cover behind a tree. These few seconds perhaps saved his life, and Komunyakaa accounts this to the flower that he noticed. The “vague white flower that pointed to the gleaming metal” is what he claims saved his life, and that he credits God for saving him through that flower. Also another saving moment mentioned in the poem is the dud hand grenade. Grenades are meant to explode, and a large majority of the time they do. Thanks to God and perhaps human error, Komunyakaa was saved from being blown into tiny bits. Truly another miracle. Komunyakaa shows thankfulness but also questions the “why me” aspect of it all. “I don’t know why the intrepid sun touched the bayonet, but I know that something stood among those trees.” Komunyakaa feels blessed and is thankful for being saved in this poem.